My Grandpa Jim, who was short, energetic, and as a young man, fabulously charming, emigrated from Five-Mile-Town, County Armagh in 1910. Sometime over the next few years, he fetched up in Southern California. Having been… Read full post »

 (Another essay from a couple of years ago, when I was still trying to get my second venture into historical fiction published the traditional way.)

 Or this one would, if it weren't a weekday. Besides the slow corrosive frustration of dealing with the various submissions processes of the b… Read full post »

(Hey look - I could have called this entry "Fried Green Pickles at the Whistlestop Cafe ... but what the heck, it was more fun this way.)

So, once the Halloween decorations were sorted out and put away, we could think of nothing better to do… Read full post »

 (A little more on the process of creating agreeable and fairly historically-accurate genre fiction - a blog-post originally done when I had nearly completed the final edit of  Book One - Adelsverein and was researching and scribbling the first draft of  Book Two.)

 Oh, the blogg… Read full post »

My daughter rather enjoys Halloween; she has a penchant for dressing up the walkway from the street to our front door with large spiderwebs adorned with large spiders, with skulls and bones scattered here and there, and strings of orange and purple lights.

 We also have a penchant for humiliatin… Read full post »

I’ve done three local book club meetings so far, to answer questions from readers who have read one or anther of the Trilogy, and have another two scheduled in the near future, so I thought I’d get around to answering some of the questions that I have been asked about the… Read full post »

Sometimes, it’s a real pain in the ass, knowing history – kind of like one of those lines of telepaths in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover novels, who could see all the possible futures, resulting from any deliberate or random action and usually went mad, from it – not daring… Read full post »

The Road to Quivera

Chapter Two: A Traveler from a New Land

             On the whole, Jane Goodacre reflected, the morning of her first day as personal maid to Lady Isobel, it was much more interesting – if a little more onerous &… Read full post »

(Just for fun, and for skeletnwmn - who is about to buckle down and get serious about her own book-writing - this was something I scribbled for my other blog, in January, 2007, when I was just getting launched on the epic which would eventually become the Adelsverein Trilogy. This is… Read full post »

(Another of the series about the Old West, and the Emigrant Trail - this journey, and the landmarks described here were featured in "To Truckee's Trail" - as in most other fictional and non-fictional accounts of the Oregon and California Trails.)

In some not inconsiderable ways, heading west along th… Read full post »

(A splash of local color at the Pearl Farmer's Market)

 So, when we went to the yearly Herb Market last Saturday, now that it has relocated from under the Oak trees at Aggie Park, to a splendid market-square venue around in back of the… Read full post »

You know, I’ll be hanging in there for several reasons – sheer stubbornness and the fact that I bought all four of them for pennies on the dollar at various library book sales being chief among them - but I just wanna say that at this point, me carrying on with… Read full post »

 (This essay was written three years ago this month - gasp! I thought it might be meaningful to re-post on the occassion of The Book - To Truckee's Trail actually breaking even as a POD.  And my follow-up book project - about which I was agonizing at the time - the… Read full post »

I did, on one single occasion, spend the entire Friday-after-Thanksgiving in the mall and department store. Not because I had a yen for joining the yearly Christmas-shopping exercise in masochism -  but because I was working retail that year. I was on terminal leave, and job-hunting in a desulto… Read full post »

 

The front of the Alamo is instantly recognizable; almost like a stage set. Everybody knows the bed-stead outline with what would have been a pair of towers on either side, a pair of shell-supported niches on either side of the door, and the window over it …… Read full post »

In the twilight afterglow of the Edward Morrow era of journalism, the only people that I remember routinely complaining about bias, selective reporting, or outright lies in journalism - print and broadcast both— were of the far-right-over-the-horizon John Birch Society persuasion, sourly grumbl… Read full post »

There is a single photograph of the interior of a covered wagon in one of my reference books; but from the jumble of items within, I would guess it to be an emigrant wagon from a period rather later than the 1840ies. It seems to contain rather a jumble of furniture:… Read full post »

Last weekend, my daughter and I drove up to the little town of Wimberly, in the Hill country, for their famous Wimberley’s open-air market. It's held on the first Saturday of every month, and sprawls over lord-only-knows-how many acres of grounds, an organically grown tangle of paved walkways a… Read full post »

The average so-called "western" movie or television series only very rarely gives a true idea of what it must have been like to take to the emigrant trail in the 1840ies and 50ies. Most westerns are set in a time-period from the end of the Civil war to about 1885, an… Read full post »